One of the things that we did in the early days of 2014 was kind of just looked around and said, you know, I think we have an opportunity to make a couple of choices that will be bold and aggressive that give us a shot to win relevance with developers of the world. And if we don't, we're going to be on an iceberg that's going to slowly melt. And at some point, we're going to be swimming. And so we kind of had a set of meetings in spring of 2014 and kind of wrote on the whiteboard, let's be bold. And came up with three big things that we said, okay, what can we do to become more relevant? The first one was we actually introduced a community edition of Visual Studio. Decision number two is let's open source .NET and let's make it cross-platform. We want the community to contribute code and do it under the right license and put it on GitHub. And then decision number three was as much as we love Visual Studio, the IDE, let's also recognize increasingly web developers and those that are not using a compiled language are looking for something that's much more of a lightweight code-optimized editor. And there was a great project that had been started. It was basically a web-based editor written in Node, written in TypeScript, but it ran in VSO online. It was great technology, but at the time people weren't really looking to write code in a browser. And the three different decisions we made, we kind of made all those decisions, I think, in about an hour and a half. Of the three decisions, they were all very big. The ones that we remember the most would be VS Code and then the open sourcing of .NET.
Microsoft was founded 50 years ago in 1975. So, how has the company changed and how it builds developer tools across these five decades? Today I sat down with Scott Guthrie who has been with Microsoft for 28 years, created the first prototype version of ASP.NET and is currently the executive vice president for cloud and AI. In this episode, we talk about a few decades of Microsoft and how Windows became a success in part thanks to shipping programming tools like Quick or MFC to help devs build programs on top of the OS. How and why Visual Basic, C#, ASP.NET, and Visual Studio were created. The time when developers paid thousands of dollars per year to access quality documentation over MSDN. How Microsoft decided to embrace open source and create VS Code as an open source project and many more topics including what Scott is excited about looking ahead. This is a rare conversation with Scott who has been with Microsoft for over more than half his lifetime. And I hope you enjoy the stories and details that he shares with us. So Scott, welcome to the podcast.
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
It is so nice to meet again, especially that we met a long time ago, 10 years ago, and that I also worked at Microsoft. But today, I'd like to talk just go back to way to the beginning, 50 years ago. It's crazy to say that that's when Microsoft was founded. And when I think about Microsoft, my first memory is Windows, but actually it started with developer tools, right?
Yeah. The very first product that Microsoft built and really, you know, not just the first product, but for many years, we were just a developer tools company. And so it was Microsoft BASIC for the Altair and Bill and Paul Allen built it while Bill was still in Harvard and you know the legend is they flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is where the company that built the Altair was. The computer no longer exists obviously and they brought a tape of Microsoft BASIC, a paper tape, and they actually plugged it in and loaded it and it worked. And it was actually they built the app BASIC entirely without access to the computer and it was kind of the hit product for that particular computer and then they expanded to other platforms and then eventually operating systems. The first dollars they made were by selling basically a developer tool.
A compiler, right? So like you could write BASIC code and it would compile to machine code, right? That was the product, right?
I think it was an interpreter at that time.
But basically, yeah, I mean it was literally and back then that was how you kind of used computers is often you were a programmer and you actually, you know, I guess today the modern equivalent would be scripting. And you built your own logic and your own applications. And so yeah, it's you know, that's one of the things that's been cool is that the company started as a developer tools company. And when you look at what we build today, whether it's VS Code, whether it's GitHub, whether it's Azure, we remain a developer tools company.
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And just stepping forward from BASIC, this was 1975, but in the 90s or actually like mid-80s Microsoft started to become big because of Windows. And as I looked into the history I was pretty surprised to see that as Microsoft developed Windows 1.0 and then you know 3.0 and 3.1 was a big big breakthrough. They always developed programs to build on top of Windows. So they did QuickBASIC, Microsoft C and QuickC. Do you think, you know, having talked with early Microsoft employees and just knowing the answer, was this an intentional strategy or might this thing actually have helped Windows become as big as it did?
Oh, I think it absolutely helped Windows become as big as it is. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're building an operating system or you're building a cloud platform, you know, your success is very much tied to it. No one buys a platform by itself. They buy it for the applications that run on top. And so if you don't have developers, you know, building those applications, you don't have a business. And so I think definitely in the early days with Windows, you know, part of the whole thesis was, you know, build great tools, make it easy to build applications that are great, help developers be successful. And if their apps are successful, we'll sell more Windows. And it's similar today with Azure in terms of, you know, one of the things I covered in my keynote was ChatGPT, which runs, you know, entirely on Azure. And you know it's like another great example of you know how do we make in this case a company, OpenAI, successful and enable them to build an amazing app and if they are successful and they're running on our platform we're successful too and so it's a model that I think is very much core to the DNA of the company.
Yeah. And then in the 90s as Windows became more popular and you know there was these tools Microsoft did something really really interesting. They built some tools that allowed maybe not as technical developers to build stuff: Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, later Microsoft FrontPage. And I'm now having a little deja vu of what we're seeing today but just reflecting on that time and what you've seen, you know, Visual Basic seems to still have a massive impact. When I worked at a bank, at JP Morgan, you know, like building software that was used by professional traders, some of the traders loved using Visual Basic, that they as non-technical people could write their own programs.
Yeah, Visual Basic at the time was absolutely revolutionary because I remember I was in high school and I was a developer on the Mac. I mean System 7 had just come out. It was like a long time ago on the Mac, you know, pre-OS X and everything, and you know, building a GUI application was a lot of work. You know, if you wanted a menu, if you wanted buttons, if you wanted a dialog, I mean, you were writing a lot of code and it was often very error-prone code because if you got anything wrong, it would crash. And there were no visual designers, you know, it was pretty much you kind of had to do everything from scratch. And Visual Basic came along and it was sort of you could drag and drop buttons, you know, visually lay them out, double click, write a couple lines of code, hit F5, and it ran. And it really transformed development. And you know we ultimately took that same paradigm and used it with Access for databases. We also had a product which is one of the ones I used. I think it's the first thing I ever got paid for was a product called Visual FoxPro which is another database product that was graphical. And then extended it to things like Visual J++ and then you know ultimately the Visual Studio family including C#, C++ and others. And so, you know, it's that notion of, you know, again, it was sort of like how do we take the friction out of what developers needed to do and provide great developer tools to do it. And as much as you know, the drag and drop aspect of Visual Basic was revolutionary. The other thing that was revolutionary was just the speed with which you could run and it had pioneered a feature called edit and continue. So you could even have the application running, modify a couple lines of code, and then push the button again, and without having to kind of rebuild or recompile or relaunch, you could actually see the edits immediately take effect. And that was also kind of transformative. I, you know, today we, you know, with JavaScript, we're sort of used to that kind of paradigm of make a change, hit save, and it just works. But, you know, in the 90s, that was radical in a big way.
Can we just rewind back time because I feel there's a bit of a similarity like back then in the 90s before Visual Basic and Access and Fox came about there was you know no way for like non-super-technical people who knew you know you learn the syntax to write programs and these things just allowed honestly everyday people like my dad who was not a developer he put together a bunch of stuff with Access later FoxPro and today we're in a similar thing. But I'd like to know like do you remember what the mood was like? Were developers saying like oh no this is the end of development. We're now you know like we're not going to have work. Was there any of this and then what happened as a result of this because now we have like 20 or 30 years of looking back of how it transformed the industry.
There probably was some you know questioning in terms of like oh is this going to you know mean anyone can be a developer. I think is often the refrain whether it's you know that era whether it's web development whether it's you know copilots and AI assistants now. You know I remember that same pushback when Java came out and .NET came out it was sort of like ah you know no real developer would ever use garbage collection oh you know it really should be you know malloc and free. And you know I think the history of development and the history of computing is really around how do we continue to optimize productivity. And you know I think what makes a developer successful or have impact you know is not syntax and it's not unnecessary writing of code that can be automated. It's often the logic. It's identifying a problem. It's the creativity and it's often the problem solving to make it work. And I think developers that embrace the new technology and build on top of it end up being so much more productive which ultimately means that they have better careers or are more impactful. And so you know I always encourage people that kind of don't assume your value is the syntax that you're familiar with you know assume the value is a higher level thing that you can leverage and you know I think it's true both for developer tools and languages you know especially in the context of AI now but I think it's also true in terms of cloud platforms. You know, I talked in my keynote this morning at Build about ChatGPT and you know, if ChatGPT had been built 10 years ago, you know, or certainly 20 years ago, a company would need to build their own data centers, they would need to build their own operating system, they would need to build their own deployment orchestrator, they need to build their own Google to do like 20 or 30 years exactly what Google had to do. And the fact that they you know they were able to leverage things like Cosmos DB and our Azure Kubernetes service you know they now have an app that's the fastest growing in history with 500 million weekly users and one of the stats I put in the keynote was they have a total of 12 people on their infrastructure team that manages all their Kubernetes and compute infrastructure and you know that type of productivity is stunning and so I do think you know I would encourage if you're a developer embrace the technology and the productivity that's coming and it only makes you more successful and have more impact and there's more than enough problems that are still left to solve.
So after Visual Basic one of the you know big years was 1997 I guess for two reasons. Was that the year that I remember that you joined Microsoft?
I did. I joined Microsoft full-time in '97. I was actually an intern in '96. So but I joined out of college I think I graduated like May of '97 and I joined Microsoft on June 16th.
And obviously in the history books we don't look back on you joining specifically but it was Visual Studio released and of course later Visual Studio became this really really powerful set of tools. I started my career working on Microsoft technologies and Visual Studio. So back then like you were at Microsoft as an intern before this came out, before Visual Studio came out. What was the story behind why did Microsoft decide to double down? There were developer tools like there was I think Microsoft had their QuickC there like there were things that kind of like compared to Visual Studio looked like very kind of early versions but there were things like that. How did this whole development come about and then why did Microsoft decide to just double and triple down on it?
Well, I think one of the big things that happened, you know, really and we kind of really started the project in '98 was both the real emergence of Visual Studio as a tool and then also .NET and they kind of you know in 2000 we unveiled kind of .NET and Visual Studio .NET together at the PDC conference in July of 2000 if I remember. And you know the impetus behind that was you know Visual Basic had been hugely successful in the mid to late 90s. But there was still this gap in between where you had Visual Basic or Visual FoxPro and then you had on the right hand side in the more advanced category C++ and you know C++ was and still is a key programming language but and there was MFC right the MFC libraries.
MFC libraries which I guess you can't talk about Windows development without. It wasn't just C++, MFC made it like so productive.
Yeah. And there was also a thing called ATL which is another library.
I haven't thought of that in a long time.
But yeah, so we had a couple different framework libraries, but it's still, you know, if you use C++, MFC made a huge difference, but it wasn't as productive as it could be. And there was this sort of gap in between. And part of why we created .NET was to sort of say, okay, can we create this common language runtime that could handle VB, could handle a C#-like language, and could handle a bunch of languages in between. And then you know could we also avoid each language having to have its own programming framework. And so like MFC only worked with C++ it didn't work with VB. You know the VB designer didn't work with C++. And you know instead could we build a common set of developer tools whether it was debugging whether it was around visual design whether it was around code optimization profiling etc. IntelliSense and leverage it and that's where really .NET and Visual Studio really took root and what basically we came up with was the common language runtime. I started a project called ASP.NET with Mark Anders, the two of us, and that was a web framework.
And when did that start compared to .NET? So like did .NET come first or was ASP.NET parallel to all of this?
Sort of parallel. I mean you basically ASP.NET started, I mean I kind of wrote the original prototype over Christmas '97 to '98. And the prototype I wrote was you know I used some C++ some JavaScript and some Java. It was kind of a you know it was more the idea as opposed to there was no code that was actually reused but it was this idea of like okay could you use classes could you use objects and could you have language productivity that allowed you to kind of work very quickly. And so Mark and I started showing it to a lot of people internally and got a lot of excitement around it sort of in parallel at the same time frame the common language runtime got started. It wasn't called .NET but it was called Core I think was the original code name. And but they were kind of building a runtime that could do languages. They didn't have libraries, but you know, they had languages. And then Visual Studio was trying to figure out, okay, we have the VB IDE, we have the VC, Visual C++ IDE, we have this Java IDE. How do we merge that?
J#. And then it all kind of came together. And so in the process of '98, these three teams sort of found each other and we started working together. And '99 we built a whole bunch of stuff including Windows libraries and for GUI and for other things. And then ultimately we were supposed to release it to the world. I think it was like the equivalent of Build we called the PDC back then. I think it was supposed to be February or March of 2000 and we were late. And so we slipped it to July and July 2000 was when we kind of unveiled it at a big event much like the Build event we're doing today and showed the world like languages, frameworks and tools all working together and that was kind of really the unveiling of .NET and tools and it was pretty critical for our success in the 2000s you know in the same way that VB really helped drive Windows client .NET really helped Windows Server and SQL Server and you know really introduced Microsoft to a generation of server programmers.
Yeah. And I think one of the most iconic you know videos and now memes is Steve Ballmer yelling developers, developers, developers, you know, sweating in the t-shirt. And usually that's the only part that gets quoted and people think, yo, you know, Microsoft was all about developers. But when you watch the whole thing, which I did, you know, the whole thing that he said, he starts at, okay, what's the $64,000 question, what the hell are we supposed to do with .NET, Steve? And then he goes developers. So, as I understand, this was about before the .NET release about how to reach developers with .NET like can you bring a little bit more behind the meme because I feel there's way more depth in this, you know, statement.
Yeah, I mean I wasn't at that event, so I don't have all the context, but I think the main point that Steve was trying to get across and you know, you see it if you ever watch the video is just the passion he had around developers and his main point was just developers really matter. And so when people say why are you doing all this? It's because of developers and developers, developers, developers. And I think that is kind of just a critical nature which is again if you want to build a platform, if you want to have an ecosystem, you have to have developers and you know ultimately developers are the ones that both build the most interesting solutions and they also push the platform and apps the hardest. And yeah, I think that was his main goal was just to get across to the audience just how passionate he was around that. It wasn't about money. It wasn't about press. It's really around are you winning the hearts and minds of developers. And I think that's a big part of why you know Microsoft Build is special is you know even take today's keynotes. It's you know tons of demos lots of hands-on live demos you know hands-on lots of labs. You know it really is an opportunity for developers to get together and it's not about sort of chest-thumping. It's more around here's what you can do and how do we you know have a good conversation and dialogue around you know what can we do better at Microsoft but also how can we make you successful.
Yeah. And so .NET was huge when it launched with Visual Studio hand in hand but a third part of why I think it was really successful at the time was C# itself. Where did C# come from? Was it in oh it must have come from inside Microsoft but was it before .NET? Was it during .NET? because I do remember that C# kept evolving as well with new features well hand-in-hand with .NET. LINQ for example was a good example where it's both the language feature but you needed framework support as well.
